


Queen of a Stolen Kingdom

by LadyArinn



Category: Chronicles of Narnia (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Anger, Bitterness, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Susan Deserved Better, The Problem of Susan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 03:39:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5232521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyArinn/pseuds/LadyArinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Susan ruled alongside her siblings for fifteen years, and then everything was taken away on nothing more than a whim. Everyone else seems to move on so easily, but she can't. Not when she remembers her people and her kingdom and how right it all had been. Not when she knows who was responsible for taking it all away, like a toy from a naughty child.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Queen of a Stolen Kingdom

**Author's Note:**

> I really have no idea where this came from. I was just doing homework Sunday night and was suddenly like, "So, in The Chronicles of Narnia they really expect us to believe that those children lived out their lives for fifteen years and then were perfectly happy to have been sent back in time to younger bodies and to a place they had purposely chosen not to go back to earlier?" 
> 
> And then I went, "Susan deserved so much better." And this was born.

When they step through the doors of the wardrobe, tumbling out of their world, their home, into this place long forgotten, it burns. Oh, oh it burns.

They stand on wobbly legs that are far too short, brush off clothing far too foreign and worn with hands that are almost comically small and soft, and Susan seethes. Because she knows Aslan and those tricks of his, his Godliness and his manipulations, and she knows in a heart that is older than the body that holds it that this is his doing, his trickery.

That white stag, the one they had all raced after to hunt down for glory and fun and games, he had had a hand in that. Of course he had. He had made it so that they would stumble out of their home and into this land they had long ago left behind and forgotten, and she had no idea why. Hadn’t they been dutiful and reverent? Hadn’t they did as he had bid them to do?

Now she knows why she had protested the hunt so much, why there had been an uneasy curl to her stomach as they rode through the forests chasing a creature that had seemed almost an illusion, and maybe it had been. Her protests, overruled by her eager siblings and shoved away by her own optimism, had been because she had known so well that they were headed toward something that would change everything. She had known, deep down, that there was no victory or glory ahead of them.

_How dare he._

She is twelve again, at least in body, while in her mind she is still a queen. In her heart she is still twenty-seven, fully grown and knowing and matured, having long ago forgotten about this life. She is Queen Susan the gentle, she is Queen Susan of the horn.

She is Susan Pevensie, they remind her. The Professor with a grin as if it had all been some big adventure, as if it were a fun story to tell over tea. Her siblings with broken voices as they remind themselves as well, hearts aching and minds so confused by the betrayal that they wouldn’t see as such.

That night and every night after until they leave the country home, Susan wanders up into that attic and opens the door, whishing with bated breath and a sickened stomach for the musty coats to give way to leaves so green they hurt to look at. For there to be fresh open air, the buzz of so much life in any singular moment that it’s breathtaking. For there to be nothing between her and spring grass beneath her feet but delicately made riding boots, for the ever playful wind to tug at hair that trails to the ground, hair she had spent half her life growing and taking care of.

But every single time her hands meet nothing but wood and she gets tangled in those damned coats that hang almost judgmentally around her. The buttons of them pull at her shoulder length hair, and the long bodies of the garments trip up her knobby legs. Around her there is nothing but the creak of an aging house and the smell of dust and mothballs and wool, the awkward staleness of a room that hadn’t been aired out or lived in properly in years. She stumbles out each night with tears in her eyes and a burning in her throat, hands smarting from hitting against the wood of the wardrobe as if force would somehow cause it to allow her passage.

She asks for a bow and some arrows one day, missing the feel of them in her hands, missing the calluses and the muscles she had spent a lifetime building up. They look at her as if she is nothing but a child and pat her on the head, telling her that there is no need for her to have such things. “Oh Susan,” They sigh, “Dear Susan. Have a biscuit, Love,” And instead they give her dolls and dresses and magazines filled with silly girls and silly clothes and expectations she does not want, because she can no longer be the creature they presume her to be. Not with so much locked away inside of her, so many memories and thoughts and knowings that no one would ever be able to understand. She wants to burn the foolish items and the stifling expectations until they were no longer even ashes, wants to tear them apart and scream because this isn’t how it is supposed to be. This isn’t how _she_ is supposed to be.

She remembers her face, the proud lines and the wise eyes, the hair that trailed after her when she ran on legs that were so quick and strong. She remembers the toned muscles of her shoulders and arms, how when she had flexed them during the more drunken banquets they had outmatched even some of the knights. She remembers hardened hands and long fingers, a voice that carried through the halls for announcements, carried throughout the lands for decries. She remembers scars across her hands and arms from snapping bow strings, remembers a burn on her calve from a fallen brazier caused by a clumsy servant.

She remembers, but has nothing to show for it except for people who treat her as a child because she is one suddenly and siblings who seem to have moved backwards into these forgotten lives so easily.

And then one day they are back. They are back and they are home but it isn’t home, of course it isn’t, because some damned lion liked to manipulate and trick and mold them until they fit to what he wanted. Well, she wanted differently. She wanted better.

They tell her to believe, that she had changed. Peter spits the words “wet blanket” at her as if it was all just some great adventure they are playing at, just another one of the infantile games they had been forced to participate in in the recent year. But this is their lives, at least it was, and while they might not be playing a game she knows with cast-iron certainty that one specific damned beast is.

1300 years. Their kingdom in ruins, their people all long dead, the thrones on which they had sat for fifteen years crumbling in ruins. They should have been dead, should have been decaying along with that which they had loved and lost.

People scoff, say that they cannot be the long lost queens and kings, that they are children. She wishes to tower over them, to look them down and lift her chin in the way she had long ago learned, staring at them at intone _“I am no child, I am a queen.”_ in a way that would assure that all the world would hear, both this one and the one of their past and present and future because she knew, she knew that this would be torn away again. This is freedom, this life and this land, and though the cat may toy with the mice by letting them think they were free, he never truly let them go from the demented torture of his game.

But she fights and loves and heals because this is where she is meant to be, where she deserves to be. Her arms are too weak to properly handle her beloved bow but it still magically hits its target every time in a way that makes her heart sing even by its falseness. Deep down, almost a secret even to herself, she begins to plan to train again. It would take a while, but not as long as it had the first time, to make it so that even if they handed her a plain bow without any enchantment she would still hit her target with every arrow she let loose, as it had once been and as it always should be. And her brothers and sister and she plan and strategize and rule in the way that they should, that they always should, and she lets herself believe.

In this way, she supposes, she really had been turned back into a child.

The bastard god tells her that she can never come back again, that she had received what she had came for. That she has to go back to England to the people who would never see her for what she was, to the family who pretended so sickeningly that they were happy with how things were. Who pretended that she was, or could ever be, happy despite what she had lost. He tells her that she would never see Narnia, her kingdom, again, and she burns like a fire that had been fed too much. And she knows, of course she does.

She has known what he was beneath the mask that he shows everyone, the mask that her siblings and their entire kingdom fell for so easily, for all too long. Had suspected for years that he was more than what he seemed, that his words and the actions he allowed them to see were just beautiful curtains that hide something. And that suspecting had turned to knowing once she knew what to look for, and that knowing had turned definite once he had discarded them like useless pawns. And it is because of this knowing that he sends her away, because of what only the two of them can see inside herself and inside of him.

England, her old life, and her old body. They are all prisons that he confines her to as punishment for her knowing him for what he truly was.

Curse Aslan. Curse him and his manipulative, vindictive soul.

They are sent back and Peter seems to accept his fate as if it was inevitable. As if this dreary country in this miserable world were where they were meant to be. As if Pevensie’s were what they were meant to be. He accepts and lives this life happily, and she can’t help but to seethe and scoff. _High king Peter the Magnificent indeed._ He goes to study under the thrice damned professor so that they might share their stories and drink their tea, laughing over the whole thing as if it were a joke.

Damn them. Damn them all.

Lucy and Edmund tell her of going back, of traveling back to their home in a different time, closer than the last, with a cousin who was stupid and cruel and apparently worth more to Aslan than her because he was unknowing. Because he could be molded into whatever the bastard deity desired. The three of them tell her of their journey as if expecting her to be happy about the whole thing, and they’re stories, they’re nothing but stories and she hates them because everything in them is something she can no longer have.

So she tells them to stop playing games, laughs at childhood fun and giggles at their insistences, heart curling and teeth gritting and just wanting them to stop.

She does what the world wants her to. She dresses in clothes she wishes were gowns, paints her lips the same color red as the bleeding wounds inside of herself, and never allows her hair to grow past her chin again. She smiles and simpers and bats her eyes, never allowing the world to see who she really is, who is trapped inside a body that will forever be too young until it’s not.

She kisses men and pretends, allows them to touch her until they handle her too loosely, with too little respect. It is one of the few things in which she does not allow herself to pretend to settle and bow as if they were so great and as if she were so unworthy. In this, she will accept no less than the respect that she deserves.

Those who don’t, who think themselves so much mightier because this world tells them they are upon the virtue of a bit of dangling flesh, these men call her uptight. In the same breath they call her too loose, when they see her walk by, and they say it as if they expect their words to have some kind of impact on her. As if they think their opinions are anything but meaningless. They think that because she plays the part of a stupid girl who is so desperate to be acknowledged that she lives and dies by their approval or scorn. But she has ice in her veins and raw wounds on her heart, has memories that she will never let die and a self-respect that she will never allow anyone to diminish, no matter what role she is playing.

One day she walks home from her work, from a job that she hates as she does everything in this life she can only grieve over as she had many times over. But this time is different. This time someone stops her, someone from the office running after her with wide eyes so ready to drink up every reaction she gives, and the loss of her entire family is said to her so casually that she thinks it must be a mistake. How could the loss of so much and so many be said so easily, like it were a passing and unimportant moment in time? How could she have not noticed such a cataclysmal event tearing her world apart? It must be some kind of sick trick, a joke that would never get her to laugh. But life has never been so kind, and this world has no sense of humor that she had ever been able to find.

She goes home to a small little apartment that will never be home and collapses, tears ruining her perfect façade, her mask crumbling as if it had never been. Despite the tensions, despite the resentment she had held, they had been her family. Her brothers, her sister, her mother and father. All of them.

Peter, who would always beat her at chess and who would scoff when she would act older than her age, even when such a thing had actually not been true. Peter, who had held the crown upon his head with great dignity, who had childishly challenged her to races down the corridors of their castle when the stress was too high and no one was looking. He had always beaten her, his longer legs eating up the distance so easily, and sometimes he would come to a stop, turn around and catch her by surprise. His hands would wrap around her waist as he lifted her up to spin her around in the air until dizziness or duties stopped them from continuing, as silly as a jester and as joyful as the sun. She had never laughed harder than she had during those small, stolen moments of childishness and fun. She had never loved anyone as purely as she had during those moments, sisterly affection and the adoration that comes from being the younger filling her up until she felt nearly ready to burst.

Edmund, who had been so sweet, a gentle thing almost ruined by the cruelty of other children and such a wretched world. But he had grown, he had changed and had become so incredible as the years passed. King Edmund the Just had known the weight of his crown, and had had a patience that was incomparable to the rest of them when it came to the matters of their people. He had never lost his sarcasm or the scathing bite that his words could hold, but he knew how to carry on such things with dignity. And oh, how he had challenged her to archery contests even when he always knew he would lose, laughing the whole way. Foolish even as he tried so hard, promising that one day he would beat her even as his arrows cluttered behind the target instead of actually in it. She had loved to ruffle his hair before big banquets or councils, had loved to hide a smile as they talked of matters of state because though he had always hastily tried to comb it back down he had always managed to miss a piece or two. And no one would say anything to him because he was a king, so his siblings got to poke at him afterwards, laughing about how the head of the treasury had been unable to take her frustrated eyes off of the rebellious tufts.

Lucy, sweet Lucy, who would brush her hair some nights in front of the fire and who would lean into her for comfort because she was the big sister and such things were her duty and privilege. In the far away past they had played with dolls and ribbons and chipped tea sets, and Lucy would always make the games so much more than they were or had to be because her imagination had been breathtaking. Lucy who was the Valiant Queen, who healed and wept and stabbed with that slim dagger only ever when provoked past the point of reason. Some nights when they hadn’t seen each other outside of their duties she would crawl into the large canopied bed with her, breathing in the sea air coming from the open balcony doors and they would laugh over the suitors who always came for the younger queen, besotted by her beauty and kindness. They would dance together during the great balls before considering any other proposed partners, spinning each other across the dance floor with smiles and laughter, their gowns flaring out as they spun.

Her mother, the one person whom seeing after all those many invisible years had been a bliss she had forgotten that existed. Who hugged so strongly and called her, “Susan my sweet,” as she brushed her hair away from her face, with a smile that held so much warmth and love. She had leaned in to whisper the mystery of womanhood to her as if it were some great secret she hadn’t known already for years, as if it all weren’t something she had already gone through. She had smiled so proudly as Susan had cultivated the role of the simple, pretty girl, as if being pretty enough to pull in a husband without effort were something to be proud of.

Her father and the memory of the way her would pick her up, cuddling her close and making it seem like she could always be protected if she never moved from the circle of his arms. The way he would kiss the top of her head no matter her age, even when she stood over him in her heels, waiting for her to sit for him to launch his not-so-surprise attack. His big hands and his small eyes, the way he would call her his “Pretty girl." The way he had held her as she cried that first time she had seen him again, sniffling into his uniform and wondering how she could have allowed herself to forget these people who meant so much to her and who she loved so astonishingly deeply.

Sometimes, not often but sometimes, she had thought that they were enough of a trade for what she had lost. And now she had lost them as well.

She sobs in a way she hadn’t since the last time she had been torn away from her land, the promise of never going back having been like shackles twisted around her heart, and she can hardly breathe from the weight that is crushing her chest and soul and whatever remaining hopes and dreams she had had. She had thought that nothing could have been worse than what had already passed, than no loss could even come close to what had already been torn away from her. How could she have been so impossibly wrong?

How could a she even continue to live with this much pain inside of her?

“Susan,” Aslan breathes, taking up the space in her living room as if it were his right to be there despite everything. As if it were his right to look upon her grief. She is shocked for barely a moment before the agony of her anger drowns it out, and then she is stumbling to her feet quickly with sorrow weeping in her heart and fury clenched within her fists. Her apartment may be small, may be inelegant and truly nothing special, but it was hers and she would be damned to be on her knees before anyone in her domain, much less the creature standing before her.

And she would never allow him to truly see her when she was weak. Her tears were not for him.

“You took them then?” She hisses, tears evaporating in the heat of her anger, “You did what you always do and just took them on one of your perverted whims, didn’t you?”

“Susan, please,” He sighs as if disappointed, dipping his head in a false show of sorrow, “It does not have to be like this.”

“You made it like this.” She stands up straighter, taking on the posture that she had never allowed herself to forget in spite of the men of this world telling her to bow. “You made me like this.” He shakes his head, that mane of his shivering with the movement, and she feels ready to breathe fire.

“And what have you come here to do now? To rub it in? To take me away again only to shove me back into this cursed pit of a world as you always do with your little pets when you grow tired of them?”

“I had come to see if perhaps you were ready, if you were willing to go to the true Narnia where your family now resides,” Part of her yearns so earnestly for that promise hidden in those words, the _‘Be good and you shall go’_ that slithers over her skin. But she gets that part in a vicious hold and rips it to shreds because she will not become what he wishes her to be just so that she can get a farce of what she wants in return. She would take a hell that she could manipulate over one that would have her as the thing being manipulated any day.

“But I see that you are not worthy. Not yet.” He sighs again, as if it really is some great disappointment to him. As if the reason he was not taking her away was because she was the one who was in the wrong. As if he wasn’t holding her family and life above her head as the carrot dangling from a stick. But she was no thoughtless ass, and she would never again allow him to lure her.

“Not ever.” She proclaims, a queen despite it all.

He disappears, as he always had, and it all builds up so much that she bursts. She screams, a wail of outrage and agony and mourning, and collapses once more beneath the weight at everything that had been taken away from her just because some damned lion disliked that she could see through his smoke and mirrors to the peddler of lies that was hidden beneath it all.

Damn him. Damn him to a hell as terrible as even a tenth of the one he had forced her to, because even that would be enough to drive a person to misery and madness. Damn him for every word that left his mouth as a promise to be broken. Damn him for playing with her as if she was a puppet, and then throwing her away because she wasn’t the pretty and obedient toy he wished her to be.

Damn him.

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate titles proposed by the always helpful CaptainKenway:  
> Susan Fo-evah  
> The Willow tree  
> The Burning Willow  
> The Burning Willow of my Heart  
> The Toothpaste of Aslan


End file.
